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The
Potemkin War
January
2, 2002
by birdman
Legendary Catherine the Great was Empress of Russia from
1762 to 1796. Along with the extremely militaristic Frederick
II of Prussia and Austria's Joseph II (the rather ditzy music
lover depicted in Amadeus) she is viewed by history as one
the 18th Century's enlightened despots. Theoretically, these
were autocratic rulers with the best interests of their subjects
at heart. Of course, in reality they were only slightly less
corrupt and self serving than their less enlightened counterparts.
When you think of Catherine the Great you essentially think
of two things about her. The first is the untrue assertion
that Catherine was killed while getting it on with a horse.
While she is known to have had numerous lovers they were apparently
all of the two-legged variety (she wasn't THAT enlightened).
The other famous story, of course, involves one of her actual
lovers, Prince Potemkin. In an effort to show the Empress
that her policies were improving the lot of the Russian people
Potemkin arranged for the Empress to take boat tours on the
Volga to see the lives of ordinary Russians. At each stop
the Empress saw happy, productive people living and working
in clean, safe little villages.
Unfortunately the villages were fake; Potemkin had created
them. Each night as the Imperial party rested (and Potemkin
presumably got laid) the cute little village was moved down
the river to the next stop on the Empress' itinerary. Whether
Catherine was actually aware of the deception is unknown but
the phrase "Potemkin Village" came to mean a false façade,
something that was created solely to look good for a particular
audience.
We are living through the Potemkin War.
The public is basically being given the war that it wants
to see - no draft, few casualties, quick, if somewhat dubious
successes. Let our loyal "coalition" allies like Pakistan
and the Northern Alliance do the heavy lifting, after all
we bought their participation with taxpayers money and a promise
to look the other way on human rights violations and (in Pakistan's
case) nuclear proliferation.
Thus far we've liberated Afghanistan from the evil Taliban
(even though the issue was really supposed to be terrorism
- not who ran Afghanistan) and replaced them with the courageous
"freedom fighters" of the Northern Alliance who proceeded
to treat the newly liberated cities as a virtual candy store
where they could commit unspeakable atrocities against anyone
who might have been a Taliban or who might have cooperated
with the Taliban for fear that the Taliban would commit unspeakable
atrocities against them. When they tired of committing atrocities
our guys proceeded in some cities to return to the pattern
of behavior they exhibited when they previously held power
in the country (i.e. stealing everything that wasn't nailed
to the floor - after all they hadn't been paid in some time
- and ravishing the women as soon as they could get those
cumbersome burkas off them - they'd been doing without a lot
of things for some time). We now seem to be moving on to nation
building, something that we, of course, said that we would
never do in Afghanistan because we were preoccupied with the
great anti-terrorism crusade.
In the meantime the person who all this was supposed to be
about may be buried under a pile of bombed rubble. But then
again it looks more and more like he might have slipped or
bought his way out of the country to evildo another day (everybody
over there seems to have their hand out whether it's government
officials being asked to support the war or other government
officials looking the other way while the bad guys escape
the war). And although our leaders appear to have no clue
where the head evildoer is calling home these days we're told
that this is no big deal. It's just one step in a grand plan
that might take years and we'll be doing really great things
even though it may not look like it at times.
Accept the notion that the war will be long and that the
results will be vague and often hidden and you will get exactly
what you've been promised - a near permanent war footing for
the country with only a thinly defined notion of what success
is. That leaves it to the prosecutors of the war to define
(and redefine) what constitutes a victory. So although we've
done little more than replace a bunch of bad guys with some
bad guys of our choosing and formed a new government out of
a bunch of factions that have spent the last two decades murdering
one another we've allowed ourselves to proclaim a great victory.
If Prince Potemkin were still around he'd be laughing like
hell.
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